Sold at RM’s Amelia Island auction on Saturday, March 10, Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky’s one-off 1929 Cord L-29 coupe by The Hayes Body Corporation is on many people’s dream car list. It was the subject of a Road & Track Salon around 1990 (let us know if you remember exactly when), but it was an object of desire long before that.

We saw it last at Gooding in Monterey in 2008, where it sold for $1.078 million, and RM’s 2012 estimate of $1.25 million to $1.5 million was well in line with that result. But the right people were obviously on the line in Florida, as hot bidding took it through the roof to $2,420,000. Thanks to the Cord and several other seven-figure sales, a total of more than $22 million on cars, and additional lots of motorcycles and memorabilia, they made $23,135,350 in total sales, just a hair off from 2011’s $24,303,850. They would have exceeded that handily, had their top no-sale Packard sold.

RM sold 104 cars at an average of $222,455.29, more cars for slightly less than 2011’s 99 cars at a $245,493.43 average. Interestingly, they only had one seven-figure sale in 2011, while this year yielded six.

Just like people flip houses, all the auctions seem to be for so that cars are being flipped the same way. They aren’t real car guys; if they were, they would enjoy it and drive it. Auctions are money-makers for them the auctions are getting out of hand.
YES-NO

Funny how these auctions are going nutz these days with obscene prices while hundreds of thousands of people are continuing to lose their jobs and homes in this economy.

Even funnier (odd-funny, not ha-ha funny) is how great designers like Phil Wright and Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky (who did the Cord in question) have their work selling for zillions and their names mentioned today like “Oh, yeah, what a great automotive man he was…!” Yet Wright and Sakhnoffsky died broke. Last time I visited Phil, I took him to dinner because he hadn’t eaten in a couple of days! I have one of Saknoffsky’s bicycles but the last contact I had with him, he was driving a cab, I think in Atlanta.

Pity these guys can’t get the kind of respect and financial accolades they deserve WHILE they are still breathing!

I was a regular visitor to the Brooks Stevens Museum, the home of this car for decades. Brooks had bought this car when it was nearly new. Curator Al Bonk had plans to restore the collection’s incredible 1939 Talbot-Lago Figoni-Falaschi teardrop coupe, when the Pebble Beach organizers called the Stevens family to tell them that they planned to feature Cords the next year, and they wanted this unique Cord to attend. Al was ordered to drop everything and he dove into the Cord restoration. His work was without peer. This car was really beautiful, and as I recall it took Best In Class and People’s Choice at PB. I was honored later to show my own Jaguar XK-140 Roadster at a subsequent meet held on the Stevens Museum property, parked just yards from this masterpiece.

Reading this I feel like crying. During 1944-45 I agonized over paying $350,00 for a 1929-30 Cord, on a used car lot in Compton California. It looked like this one (Born in 1929 my self, I had a special attachment for this car).

As I recall, like other Cords, it was front-wheel drive. A lever on the dash pulled out, one notch at a time, to shift thru the gears. From a dead-stop it accelerated without spinning the wheels. What a thrill!

I was saving for college at the time and had to pass on it in favor of a $50,00 Chevy coupe (1927) which I bought from a neighbor, Troy Rutman, who later won the Indianapolis 500 in something more than a Chevy.

For years I actually had dreams about driving this Cord and have always wondered if it would have been a “Babe Magnet.” Now, at the current price, I’ll never know.